Category: Technology

Artificial Intelligence processors seem to be the biggest mobile breakthrough in 2017. Especially, in flagship phones starting with Huawei’s Kirin 970 AI processor announcement, which will be seen in the Huawei Mate 10 (launching next week). Apple also added in an Neural engine in their new A11 Bionic chip which ships with their new iPhone lineup. So how is the AI processor different from what most of us have in our smartphones? Putting it simply, AI processors have an additional inbuilt Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that is capable of lots of parallel processing, uses low power and is capable of cognitive tasks like prediction & classification. More like how the human brain works.

Google announced two new wearables today. Pixel Buds & Google Clips were announced at Google’s Pixel 2 launch event. With voice becoming an important platform for users to interact with their digital world, these wireless ear buds make perfect sense. But more than an added convenience, Pixel Buds actually have an essential use case. Real-time language translation.

Saying that the smartphone landscape is evolving, would be like saying water is wet. With the advent and growing popularity of Chinese players, and the involvement of bigger OEMs to up their ante and innovate more, we’re looking at smartphone launches at unprecedented rates – both in terms of frequency of launches, as well as number of products launched in a single event.

But let’s take a pause, step back, and look at the bigger picture. A rise in the number of launches would have a significant impact on the supply-demand ratio for an OEM, and this would in turn lead to changes in the smartphone upgrade cycles as far as consumers are concerned. And that shall be the crux of this article: I look at the market as a whole, what the trends point towards, and what the effects might be on supply-demand, as well as the other constraints.

iOS 11 is bringing in some major additions & changes to the Health app on the iPhone. Starting with iCloud syncing, diabetes management & new workout data. Apart from this there are new workout activities available that developers can also integrate in their apps. There is also better integration with Watch OS 4 in terms of insulin management for diabetics and for swimming tracking.

Here’s an open secret to start things off: Connected technologies are evolving like never before. We’ve always seen the advent of wearable manufacturers and have seen different use cases for trackers, and while the market might be plateauing a little, it’s opening a window to explore more varied use cases.

A couple of days back, I came across this application which scans your face and automatically adds dynamics – it makes you look older, younger, can add or modify your smile and even show how you’d look if you were of the opposite gender. A novelty app at best, FaceApp does bring about the big question: Can AI actually power the next generation of consumer technology?

What makes a good smartphone brand, a great one? Innovation? Definitely. Collaboration with big brands? Works in the longer run. A presence in non-smartphone areas? More fishing rods in the pond, right? It’s quite a given, actually: a smartphone brand cannot be great by following a singular path.

With wearables being more connected to us than our smartphones they know so much about us. This makes it vulnerable to security and privacy issues. There might be many risk factors which are general to all such devices. For example they are able to transfer and store personal data, but do not include PIN protection or user authentication features.